Billionaires, Russian and otherwise

How do they do it?

About 10 years after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian billionaires appeared on the scene.

Something similar seems to have happened in a similar timeframe here and elsewhere.

If you assume that these people somehow managed to start with one million, they would have had to double their worth every year to reach the billion mark.

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, .... 256, 512 million, 1 billion.

How is that possible?

I don't have any strongly doctrinaire views about billionaires; if you divided one individual's billion among the 60 million in the UK, each person would get about 17 quid, and there aren't enough billionaires here to multiply that by very much, even if all of them were stripped of all their money. And maybe doing so would cause huge damage to the economy; I don't know.

But I would like to know how they manage that doubling trick. Not to do so myself (though it would certainly come in handy!) but to know what sort of probably-antisocial tricks are involved.

When everyone else is being told about austerity, it would seem only fair that they too should take a hit.

Reply to
Windmill
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Two fine examples...

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Reply to
Adrian

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After the dissolution of USSR there was a tricky privatisation program, where all the assets previously belonging to the state (or, as the Constitution stated, to the people of the USSR) became someone's personal assets. There were many tricks involved, one of them being - an asset that is worth billions was bought for a couple of millions (measures were taken to ensure that there was only one participant in the auction, etc.). Just my two cents, I lived there at that time :)

BTW, careful with Wikipedia, don't believe everything it says. But ti gives you the basic idea.

Reply to
tum_

Oh, how very naif. They made it MUCH faster than mere doubling. They managed it very simply: because they are thieves not businessmen, albeit thieves who had the sanction of the then-President Yeltsin. They have stolen much of Russia's infrastructure and natural resources. For example, Yeltsin put Mikhail Khodorkovsky's 'bank', Menatep, in charge of the bidding process for the privatisation of Yukos Oil. Guess what, he sold it to himself for ~$300m, a fraction of its conservative valuation of >$7bn.

Anyone who opposed the crooks, such as Vladimir Petukhov in the Yukos affair, was killed. They are bandits who have been fawned upon by our governments since the mid-1990s, given residents' permits. They should be sent back in chains. At least Khodorkovsky's behind bars, but they all should be there.

Read Amy Chua's 'World on Fire' for a forensic analysis about how countries (not just Russia) can be hijacked by one small group of crooks. It is both fascinating and chilling. Also good is 'Darkness at Dawn', by David Satter.

Reply to
Charlie

"Windmill" wrote

Try putting that into reverse: try to get each of the

60 million people to give you 17 quid (eg by selling them something everyone wants, at 17 markup).
Reply to
Tim

Second link doesn't seem to work ?

Reply to
Windmill

Nice work if you can get it.

A stressful time?

I've noticed quite a few small errors in unimportant articles, so presumably the important stuff gets hashed around quite a lot.

Reply to
Windmill

I'll plead guilty to that. But the 'doubling' example was just meant to emphasise how unlikely it all was.

I thought that it could only be done through some antisocial behaviour, at the very least.

Doubtless they brought money in large quantities. That seems to be hard for people to resist.

I believe you.

Reply to
Windmill

If someone were able to go from ignorance of the concepts to development then full production of mobile phones, say, after having changed everyone's desires, they could certainly be a billionaire in a year.

But surely it would be slower and much more difficult than that?

Reply to
Windmill

Works from here, but I'm sure you can figure out how to find it manually...

Reply to
Adrian

You can't get it by any "ethical" means. The measures I mentioned included (but were not limited to) extermination of the potential rivals.

Not to me personally, I was lucky not be in wrong places at wrong times, I didn't have wife and kids and my parents were not as old as they are now :) But for many "a stressful time" is a huge understatement, many people (elderly & sick) simply died from hunger and neglect, many young and ambitious people were killed by either competitors or criminals (racket(?)) trying to organise their business, many others, not-so- ambitious and not-so-young, died from alcohol and drugs as they could not adapt to a new (jungle-style) way of life.

20 years past and Russia still gradually recovers from the nightmare of 1990s.
Reply to
tum_

Of course it's unlikely. There are about 6 billion people in the world and only about 1000 billionaires, i.e. about 1 in 6 million.

Reply to
Gareth

Of course it is. I don't think many billionaires went from ignorance to mobile phone tycoon in less than a year.

Reply to
Gareth

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